I’ve been really lucky this year to have the opportunity to write more frequently. I attribute part of this to the support I receive from Sedagive?, giving up StarCraft 2 and the jobs I’ve been taking lately, including my current full-time job. My quality of life has been on the rise, and I hope it continues in 2014.

I like learning from my mistakes and past experiences, and one of the things I look forward to in 2014 is making some changes to the content and purpose of this blog. When people ask me what Gibberish is all about, I tell them it’s the most extensive blog they’ll find about nothing. I write about many topics, review many different kinds of products, and discuss many diverse interests. I started Gibberish as a communication tool for all of my long-distance friends; I hoped that writing as I do would replicate many of the in-person recommendations I used to make before we all scattered to the four winds.

However in looking at my organic Google traffic the last 12 months it’s become clear that specialist sites and Amazon are siphoning off a lot of my search rankings and therefore the people who can find my articles.

Starting next year I am going to specialize this blog a little bit more, and split off my content to a few other Web properties.

The biggest change is going to be the movement of firearms-related posts to a different blog. I will link from the new blog back to Gibberish, but for security reasons I won’t be posting links from Gibberish to the new blog. The new gun-focused blog will push the limits and perception of how US civilians train and carry firearms in public responsibly.

I will also write all future board and card game reviews on my gaming-focused blog Board Games and Burger Night. Pushing non video game reviews to BG&BN will help provide better search rankings for the titles I review. The blog will be narrowly-focused, and that’s how Google seems to prioritize rankings these days.

I am going to experiment with allowing other content writers to write for Gibberish and my other two content properties. I’m not sure how it’s going to turn out, but I am excited to have different writing styles and opinions on the blog. I am also hopeful that it will keep the number of posts on each blog up. I have a very lucky life right now, but not enough free time to write for three blogs five times a week each.

Lastly, I’m going to experiment with more YouTube videos. My main YouTube channel has over a 1000 subscribers and almost six million views. My YouTube channel is out-earning my Gibberish ads 10-to-1 and besting my Amazon affiliate links by about 8-to-1. However, generating video content involves a lot more effort than writing (at least for me) and so I am going to see if I can generate enough content to make it worthwhile. My IKEA Marcus chair assembly video is the kind of weird how-to post that gets mentioned once or twice on the Internet and then becomes very popular. Surprisingly, my video of using a shaving soap stick is the #1 ranked result in YouTube and has twice the views of similar videos.

I will also be making an in-home production studio so that my videos look and sound better. I already experimented with adding royalty-free, licensed music to a few of my videos.

Some of these efforts will be successful, and some will not. I look forward to giving them all a shot and see which ones stick next year and beyond.

2 Comments on "Gibberish Changes in 2014"

A quick comment on music for videos for Youtube. Check out Zircon Studio’s zircon vault! Over 10 hours of music which he’s approved for YouTube use for $80! There’s some kicking stuff in there which I’m pretty sure you’ll like based off your previous music posts.